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I hope people here give Valve the same flack they gave Nintendo and Sony for raising prices.
Hell, the Switch 2 went up $50 and everyone on Lemmy lost their god damned minds in that thread because “Nintendo bad” or whatever. But I’m sure because it’s our sweet baby angel Gabe on his 20 yachts we’ll all be reasonable about the $200+ upcharges.
Look, none of these companies WANT to raise prices on these consoles. It’s just the AI bullshit and stupid ass tariffs ruining everything. That’s what needs to change.
They lost their minds because Nintendo said:
Last week, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa told shareholders that the house of Mario had no current plans to raise the price of its $449.99 Switch 2.
Then they raised the price of the original switch and a bunch of the accessories.
Then the tariffs in the US were deemed to be illegal and they sued to get their --money-- profit back and didn’t want to repay the price increase they passed along to their customers.
There’s also the fact that Nintendo was on a lot of people’s shit lists for their litigiousness and other anti-consumer crap they had done so people were already mad at them before they raised prices.
When you look at it that way, Sony (who were also on people’s shit lists for a laundry list of reasons) are no better in many’s eyes.
Also, this completely ignores how small a company Valve is in comparison to Nintendo and Sony. I think that’s the main problem actually. Valve isn’t a hardware power house and they can’t command the kind of sales contracts or parts/fab that Nintendo or Sony can. So they are less likely to be able to withstand raising prices on their hardware as a result. The fact that they have raised prices so late in comparison to their counterparts in the space is interesting even if you don’t find it laudable.
At the end of the day, the backlash that Sony and Nintendo faced wasn’t because of the price increase so much as it was because of all the other stuff.
Requiring proprietary hardware for $80+ games that almost never go on sale or have online subscription services that also keep going up, and then anti-consumer practices like (in Sony’s case) the whole have to have an account to play their games on PC and not wanting to issue refunds where a PS account wasn’t available but people bought the game and oh well we just won’t port our games to PC at all then, and so on.
Like. There’s way more to it than Valve good, Sony/Nintendo bad.
LOL. I mean imagine paying such inflated prices for such little storage capacity before the our vile AI overlords decided that silicon was for AI not humans? There is no way I will ever buy anything going forward other than an entry level smart phone and a single Linux PC until China stabilized silicon chip pricing. There is no way I am replacing even those two items before we see how things play out over the next couple of years. Leased computing with thin client device that connects and uses an ISPs servers for computing power? Nope, go fuck yourself.
$1130 CAD for the 512gb model.
I built my gaming desktop for that price and it has a 4070 super.
Next word generating companies have literally made personal computing unaffordable for the next decade (at least).
have literally made personal computing unaffordable
…not if you buy our XBOX GAME CLOUD!!! and WINDOWS 365!!! rent forever and own nothing! the future is looking bright 🤑 /s
Cold day in hell i ever subscribe to that shit.
unaffordable for the next decade
If you’re talking RAM prices, those are expected to come down in early 2028, so 18-ish months.
So how are they expected to come down? If new capacity becomes available the ai companies would gobble it up again.
Just ad infinitum? If so, the most profitable venture for any human being to be involved in right now would be RAM production. All of those producers would be expanding, because there would be infinite demand. No, these purchases are capex costs; the kind that they have to do once or every so many years. And the only way it happens every so many years is if the companies currently buying these things survive long enough to replace those parts when they reach their end of life.
I guess I’m not buying the steam machine. It sure seems buying technology is an investment now.
SM is going to cost like 1000+ isn’t it…
Pretty sure it always was. Tge steam machine was already fucked by the time aome random guy wrote an article that just randomly assumed it’s gonna cost 500 dollars for no reason at all
Who was that dickwad?
At this point, try closer to $1200-$1500, and that’s for the BASE model.
We so cooked
Holy fuck. It’s happening.
SM?
Sadomasochism.
Steam Machine
BD
PP hee hee
deleted by creator
Oof I mean I’m glad they are back in stock again but that stings. I do see valve being the only company that would lower them as soon as they are able though. Public shareholders wouldn’t let them if they were public.
Nah, that’s not true. All of these companies would absolutely love to charge less for the console up front so that they can get recurring payments out of you elsewhere. It was a regular occurrence for decades that console prices would drop dramatically over time.
Less of an issue with Valve. They don’t have as much of a need for a hardware loss leader since they earn from Steam regardless of which hardware it’s running on.
Also, by virtue of the fact that the Deck and Steam Machine are de-facto PCs, if they made those products loss-leaders, they would get bought up to use for non-gaming purposes and reduce availability for their intended audience. The same thing happened to the PS3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
As I understand it, none of the consoles are loss leading these days.
If they structure their supplier contracts anything like the auto industry does, that would only be because they are on the back end of the product’s production lifecycle.
I think they lost the appetite for loss leading around the time the PS4 and Xbox One came out. I have no insider information, but this is what I tend to hear from those that do. Nintendo famously doesn’t loss lead, and that’s a long standing policy, but the latest word on Switch 2 is that their price increase keeps them profitable but with smaller margins than they had when it initially launched.
All this for stupid fucking anime profile pics
This timeline sucks.
Holy hell what a jump! Yeesh, I’m glad I got one in January, but there’s no way I’d be paying 1k for it.
919,00€ for OLED 1TB model in Germany.
I have no hopes for Steam Machine price now…
I will never buy a new system again.
It’ll be a few years of pain, but once the bubble pops, we can start to return to normalcy. Take good care of the hardware you have in the meantime.
I don’t want to crush people’s optimism (I’m also envious of your viewpoint), but what makes you think any of this will pop and return to normalcy?
Because none of this is profitable and has no plans to be profitable.
We’re in this place because AI companies are buying up all the supply, and in order to do that, they have to pay higher than market rates to buy what’s left of the supply available. That means their break-even point is now higher than it would be in a rational economy, and they’re already not profitable. That’s a bubble. It doesn’t matter if it’s tulip bulbs, a business with “dot com” on the end of its name, or a home that no one lives in; if you’re expecting to make money off of the next greater fool, it will pop.
But let’s say it doesn’t. The other way to meet the supply-demand curve and make money off of consumers like you and I who want to buy hardware at prices that we can afford is to increase production so that there’s more supply. If this is the new normal (it’s not), the component producers can increase their manufacturing capacity, and in a handful of years (pessimistically about a decade to build those sorts of factories, which would be brutal if true), they’ll have enough throughput to meet everyone’s demand. And I don’t think those producers are looking to scale up because they also don’t believe this is the new normal. If they believed that, then they’re leaving future profits on the table by not scaling up production to meet demand.
And I don’t think those producers are looking to scale up because they also don’t believe this is the new normal. If they believed that, then they’re leaving future profits on the table by not scaling up production to meet demand.
They are so wrong, though.
Holy fuck. How is it even competitive at this price?
Competitive with what, buying your own computer? Because that stuff is expensive too.
With the switch. Or the asus rog handheld, which as of now is only what, 50€ more? ( wonder how much that one will last at that price tho )
The RAM and SSD have gotten that much more expensive to source. Anyone who sells a product with similar components either raises their price, or takes a loss.
Even laggy crap DDR4 RAM is at almost $6/GB; DDR5 (like the Deck uses) is double that. The absolute cheapest appropriate-sized 512GB M.2 drive is $100, from a no-name brand. The whole market has gone down the tubes thanks to AI companies buying up absolutely everything.
It isn’t.
Unfortunately, given the current economy, its not suprising. With how much prices have risen, the old pricing competed with and often beat out even used desktops.
Oof I can’t recommend a new one to anyone at that price. Fortunately there’s still a lot of used ones around where I live, but that’s a big old yikes.
I wish I could muster the ability to give a fuck at this point. Between trumps bolocks and the us ai industry fucking everyone over.
Im kinda of you brought this on yourselves at this point
Sure, but if the price is going up here, it’s the latest symptom of prices going up everywhere for this hobby.
Yeh and that’s why im fucking pissed. The rest of the world is getting shit because of American internal bolocks
AI might be a problem for this market with or without the US, but tariffs and a war with Iran that drives up oil prices (and therefore plastic and electronics manufacturing) sure is our fault.
Most of the major players in the AI industry is in the US as well, and they get to do their monopolistic corrupt shit because of Trump, so that is largely also a US created problem.
Your right it might. But it isn’t its a problem because sam altman et al are buying stuff that hasnt been made yet for that datacenters that haven’t been built yet egged on by a body that’s supposed to keep these assholes in check.
